Best Practices for Filtering by Country

[nullPointer]

Hello GameEx Masters

I'm in the midst of reconfiguring GameEx on my HTPC. In doing so I'm finally getting around to cleaning up my ROM lists a bit. I'm attempting to set up ROM filters so that only USA, Europe, and World releases appear in my lists. Essentially I'm attempting to filter out Japan, Asia, and Unknown releases from my sets. Currently I'm using the ROM Filter field to accomplish this but I'm getting some mixed results. For some reason it works great for NES, but not so much for SNES. Before I go down the path of troubleshooting that issue, I'd like to ask you guys how you'd go about setting this up. I'm aware that I'm abusing the ROM Filter functionality somewhat in this regard (i.e. it's true intention is to filter by file extension, not necessarily to filter by sub-string on the ROM title). Whichever method I use I'd like to a. achieve my desired filters (obviously), and b. not have GameEx take a huge performance hit.

Here are some possible options (in the form of responses to my question), but there may of course be options I'm not seeing:

• Using the ROM Filter is the way to go. Carry on nullPointer! Let's see your Filter String and GameEx.ini so we can get to the bottom of that SNES issue.
  
• Don't use the ROM Filter field for this purpose you Neanderthal! Use the Excluded Files field to list each and every ROM you'd like to omit. Perhaps using Romlister (or something similar) would be a quick and easy way to generate this list.
  
• Follow the step above but go one step further and use the generated list to simply delete all those ROMS that you'd like to exclude. You're not going to play them anyway right? (Would this be the best bet in terms of GameEx performance?)
  

So there you have it. Which of these options would be best? Anyone already doing something similar on their systems? Would there be yet another option preferable to any of what I've listed here?

Thanks in advance!

[Draco1962]

IMHO, I would say if you know you will never play it, then delete it altogether. I do not envy anyone that has to do that to 30+ emulators, but honestly, I think you will save in performance all around. I think that option 3 of the above is most sound.

[fRequEnCy]

You could always just build a set based on those filters to make it simple using a rom management program. Also since the filters can only do so much, you can also just make a map file to include the roms you want in the list. Take a look at Tempest's Map File Magician. It can help with making a map file to your liking.

[nullPointer]

Thanks a lot for the advice! In the end I ended up doing something different than any of the options I listed, but I think for me it's the option that will work best. After playing with a couple of ROM sorting utilities, it donned on me that I was trying to make the process way to complicated.

So I created a new directory for the ROMS I want to display in GameEx (we'll call it "E:\Emulation\Roms\[system_Name]_KEEPERS" for this example). Next I went into MS-DOS, navigated to my 'old' ROM directory (E:\Emulation\Roms\[system_Name]), and ran a command like this:

move *(USA* "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]_KEEPERS"

That still left a few ROMS with names that didn't quite match the pattern (something like "Totally Awesome Game (Japan, USA).zip"). Running the following command took care of the fringe cases:

move *USA)* "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]_KEEPERS"

I did the same thing for Europe and World (maybe a couple of others). After running the commands I did a quick verification to insure nothing was missed. Lastly I moved the old directories to "E:\Emulation\Roms\Excluded_Roms\[system_Name]" and renamed the 'keeper'directory to the old name recognized by GameEx (E:\Emulation\Roms\[system_Name]). Bing bang boom done.

I don't know if it's the 'best practice' or not but it certainly worked for me. I'm still keeping the Excluded Roms directory hanging around for now, but I'll probably move it to an archive at some point.

Incidentally for anyone playing along at home the following commands would have also worked just fine, and would saved me the trouble of navigating in MS-DOS:

move "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]" *(USA* "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]_KEEPERS"

[Adultery]

Why wouldn't you just change the wildcard to *USA* instead? Or did you want to see what region they were if they weren't getting picked up?

[nullPointer]

Why wouldn't you just change the wildcard to *USA* instead? Or did you want to see what region they were if they weren't getting picked up?

That's a good question, and that's also where my mind went first. The main reason I didn't is because there are actually some Japanese games with USA in the title (I'm away from my GameEx machine, but 'Super Mario USA' is one example I can think of off the top of my head), possibly games from other regions as well. I wanted to filter strictly by Country of Origin, so I made sure to include either the left or right parentheses in the wild card.

It's also occurred to me that some sets might include more than 2 countries within the parentheses most likely separated by commas. I think a *USA,* string would be the best bet for picking those up. Also noteworthy is that I've only done this for No-Intro sets so far. I'm pretty sure something similar should work for TOSEC, but obviously not so much for Goodsets (or similar) where everything is bundled together. I think in that scenario the best bet would be to build a custom DAT for filtering which is of course more time consuming.

[bkenobi]

There's probably only a few of those games, but you could also adjust your filter so it read something like:

move "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]" *(*USA*)* "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]_KEEPERS

There's lots of ways to skin a cat. The most important thing is getting every cat skinned!

[nullPointer]

There's probably only a few of those games, but you could also adjust your filter so it read something like:

move "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]" *(*USA*)* "E:\Emulation\Roms\[System_Name]_KEEPERS

There's lots of ways to skin a cat. The most important thing is getting every cat skinned!

Oooo . . . Now that's cookin' with some grade A propane! Good call bkenobi! I'll have to try it out when I get home. I think once I get everything sorted I'm going to throw these commands into a batch file that accepts the base directory and target directory as parameters. Probably won't use it all that much, but if I need to update my rom sets it's right there ready to roll.